Early Years

Born November 17, 1931 in New York City to parents Harry Vincent Fleming and Phoebe Dupre Fleming.  His father Harry, was born in Rhode Island to English and Scottish immigrant parents and worked in sales for Burlington Mills. His mother Phoebe, was born in the French-Canadian immigrant community in the industrial town of North Adams, MA, later moving to New York City where she took art classes and worked as a window designer for Manhattan department stores.  Growing up in Douglaston, NY on the north shore of Long Island, with his sister Joyce, Guy’s artistic talents were encouraged by his mother, who taught him to draw as she continued to develop her own skills as a painter. 

Education

Upon graduation from Bayside High School in 1949, he entered Yale University, graduating in 1953 with a BA in Art & Art History.  His interests in colonial American architecture and the American transcendentalist literary movement continued to inspire him in his art, his reading, and his later woodworking.

After college graduation Guy served in the US Army doing his basic training at Ft. Dix, NJ.  He was sent to Germany.on an overseas posting as a “clerk-typist,” but when it was discovered that he couldn’t really type he was sent to the Cartography school in Schwetzingen, near Heidelberg, Germany. The skills he gained there added to his book design abilities later in his career, even leading to an award for maps in one of the annual AIGA 50 Books awards.  

Returning from Germany in 1955, he began graduate work at Yale School of Fine Arts and received his MFA in Graphic Design in 1957.

Early Professional Life

In 1956, Guy married Ruth Foster of Sagaponack, NY whom he’d met during college when she was attending Skidmore College with his sister Joyce. Upon receiving his MFA from Yale, Guy  and Ruth moved to New York City in 1957  where he began working for Alfred A. Knopf publishers.  Knopf was well known for the high level of design of their books, most of which included a colophon following the text describing the history of the typeface used. Some of the best-known typographers, designers and artists, including W.A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and Harry Ford, worked for the publisher.  It was during this time that Guy worked alongside Vincent Torre and Warren Chappell, who remained close friends and colleagues throughout his career.

Freelance Career

In 1959, Guy and Ruth moved to Sagaponack, NY where they renovated Ruth’s grandfather’s house and had 2 children: Faith and Douglas.  Guy continued to work for Knopf as a designer but began working  more on a freelance  basis for additional NY publishers. In 1968, they moved to Alna, Maine and Guy began a fully freelance career.  The list of publishers he worked with now expanded to include Alfred A. Knopf, Athenaeum, Harper, Random House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Basic Books, Simon and Schuster, and MacMillan. Additionally he began working with a number of university presses including Indiana University Press, Southern Illinois University Press, Northwestern University Press, and ??   

Within the time of his freelance career,  eight of the books Guy worked on were awarded recognition in the AIGA’s Fifty Best Books awards (covering the years 1959-63 and 1965-67) and one of his numerous Harper Torch Books jacket designs was chosen for the AIGA Paperbacks U.S.A.1959-1961 competition.

New Directions

As freelance work began to dry up for Guy in the late 1970s (?) he began to consider taking on  a regular position, and accepted an offer at Cornell University Press in Design and Production. In 1978 he moved to Ithaca, NY to begin the position, but after 2 months decided it was not what he wanted and he returned to his home in Maine. When a position as Art Director at the University of Virginia Press came up, his friend Warren Chappell urged him to relocate. This time he and his family made the move to Charlottesville in 1979, where he worked for one year before deciding that again he was not happy in the position and they returned to Maine.

Throughout the 1980s Guy continued to work for some Maine publishers including Down East Magazine, Guy Gannett Publishing (Maine Sunday Telegram), and Thorndike Press. He also had the opportunity to concentrate on his own work.  Since graduate school, printmaking from wood blocks had been an important aspect of his book designs and his own artwork, but it was at this time that he found the blocks themselves could  become the piece of art. His first completed work in this medium was a woodcut of Canada Lillies that he completed by carving the latin names of the individual species into a frame surrounding the original block. He continued experimenting, digging into the wood even deeper--the blocks thus became bas reliefs, and even works of sculpture.

Final Years

In the later 1980s Guy began to have problems with his eyes, making the detailed work of book design nearly impossible.  Between visits to specialists, he began working with oils rather than the egg tempera painting he had used previously.  As his eyes worsened, his style became more abstract, with increased texture and thickness of the painted surface.  Finally, losing the ability to drive, he and Ruth moved back to Long Island, where extended family offered better caregiving support for Ruth. Guy passed away In late August, 2001 from what was later found to have been Multiple Sclerosis.

Awards 

1958 - AIGA Fifty Best Books for Don Juan: the Life and Death of Don Miguel de Manara (Knopf, 1958) – for design and calligraphy

1959 - AIGA Paperbacks U.S.A (1959-1961) for A History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the 16th & 17th Centuries vol.1 - for jacket design (Harper, 1959)

1961 – AIGA Fifty Best Books for Portrait of the Symphony (Basic Books, 1960) – for design

1962- AIGA Fifty Best Books for Scribbledehobble (Northwestern, 1961) - for design

1963 - AIGA Fifty Best Books for Paris on the Seine (Atheneum, 1962) - for endpaper illustration

1965 - AIGA Fifty Best Books for 77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1964) - for design

1965 - AIGA Fifty Best Books for Standing Up Country (Knopf & U. of Utah, 1964) - for design

1966 - AIGA Fifty Best Books for At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Random House, 1965) - for design

1967 - AIGA Fifty Best Books for 1775: Another Part of the Field (Knopf, 1966) - for design

1973 - Chicago Book Clinic Certificate of Award for The Alaska Gold Rush (Indiana University Press, 1973) - for design

1974 - Chicago Book Clinic Certificate of Award for Baba Yaga's Geese and Other Stories (Indiana University Press, 1973) - for design, typography, binding and illustrations

1976 - Chicago Book Clinic Certificate of Award for The Baltic Crusade (Northern Illinois University Press, 1976)